Daft from its outset when a woman, Sylvia Rule, not only accosts Hercule Poirot believing him to have sent her a poison pen letter but also longwindedly explains to him what he'd know had he really sent it, this Sophie Hannah mystery is a ponderous exercise with a nebulous plot centred on a non-event (the accidental death in a bath of a feeble old patriarch) and when you've finally reached the last boring word having endured all manner of unlikely character psychology (including a Hercule Poirot who winks slyly and grins as he lies and tells a businessman his secretary was in an accident and will lose both her legs), you realise the biggest mystery here is why the overseers of the Agatha Christie estate would allow such thinly-plotted tripe to be published in the Queen of Mystery's name.
★☆☆☆☆
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